BEASTMAKER - Inside The Skull (2017) LP

The glittering technological future we were all promised has turned into a dystopian nightmare. If music must reflect the times, the hour has plainly come to reject the mainstream status quo and get down to the roots and rhythms of life’s elemental heaviness. And that’s where Beastmaker come in. Purveyors of some of the most ecstatically thunderous and raw doom metal to emerge in decades, this three-man riffing machine from Fresno, California, are manifestly the real deal. Their sound is instantly recognisable and yet thrillingly otherworldly, like all your favourite riffs fed through some perverse malevolent prism and reborn in fresh, overdriven grotesquery.
Bursting into the consciousness of the world’s doom hordes with their debut EP You Must Sin in 2015 and debut album Lusus Naturae the following year Beastmaker have already won over countless converts, not least with an extensive European Tour in 2016 with Blood Ceremony, climaxing with a much-praised appearance at the hallowed Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Holland. They hit the ground running and earned a formidable reputation as a crushing live act.
But while they may superficially appear to servants of a strict Sabbathian code, there is plenty of room for manoeuvre within the band’s titanic sound. The result of this feverish desire to expand their sonic universe is new album Inside The Skull, a bruising tour-de-force of sinister riffs, skewed blues and looming horror, it is simply one of the heaviest and most mesmerising albums you will hear in 2017, replete with a special cameo or two.